The mobile web doesn't excite me so much, it's too expensive in the UK to do mobile web (£1 per Mb, and a 1Mb 'free' allowance per month. Gimmie a break!). If the mobile web was as cheap as the static web (I pay ~£25 a month for unlimited broadband, so on a per Mb basis it's very cheap!), then it might take off more.

Since everyone will have a phone / computer in their hands. That tweet will hit everyone instantly, not just the users on their computers.

Is web 2.0 dead? No, I am seeing people add me to their Facebook that don't even know where the power button is on their computers, so it's hitting everyone now. All ages and all niches are grasping Web 2.0 so it is not dead. It is alive and running.

We just need to keep looking to the future. Web 3.0 will redefine the way we find things on the 'net and where we start looking for the answers (system, phone, telepathy??).

The only thing that's "dead" are they days when you could bullshit your way into a raise or the corner office by using buzzwords.

As for the swag bag: 1. Leave the pens at the ATM counter becuase the bank's pens are all gone. 2. Drop the shirts off at the thrift shop for someone who needs a new shirt, and then 3. Save your money, postage, and the mail carrier's time, and dump the rest of the swag bag into your real-world trash bag, but 4. Recycle what you can.

So is Web2.0 going to die -- Naw, because it was never born.

Sure, mobile web is next. But that comes hand in hand with both real-time (a la Twitter) and location-aware Web. Our social networks will be everyone with a cellphone at that subway station at that time.

I'm waiting for my glasses/contact lenses that stream updates straight to my eye and posts updates straight from my brain.

I work for public libraries and, I can assure you, there are many, many people who are not using social media, don't have mobile devices beyond a basic cell phone (and may never have more than that) and don't have broadband in their homes. In many large sections of my state, broadband isn't even an option for residents, with the exception of what they can get via the computers at their public libraries.

Web 2.0 applications have become an increasingly important form of communication. Unfortunately, it is a form that is nearly unreachable for many. It will not truly reach the mainstream until broadband internet and affordable computers do.

However I would like to believe that we are also on the verge of a new era of the internet, what I would term as the profiling era(the part of Google Epic Google never got right). In this era you do not find information, but the information finds you, and as you find new information you give it to everyone else, thus contributing to this cycle. Even Google seems somewhat irrelevant in this breaking news heaven(http://tinyurl.com/cjsyyw). But just a thought :)

Next, social media. Yay, we all want in! Everyone get a Facebook page! Check out Second Life! Get a Twitter feed!

People are starting to say, "wait a minute." How's this Twitter thing making any money? What am I supposed to do with a Facebook fan page?

We'll pull into our pupa and think a bit on this. Something amazing will emerge.

I don't know what it is. But it's coming.

In the mean time, I want my Wi-Max, unlimited wi-fi connectivity wherever, whenever.

And a jet pack. I want a jet pack, too.

Take Gmail as an example. It's web response was 2.0 like in that it would only refresh selected parts of the page as necessary, it is now into the 3.0 territory with caching of frequent or expected next read emails. We'll know Gmail is approaching 4.0 like web response (as I've defined it) when it knows us well and predicts/suggests the next email we are most likely to read.

Let's take one more example of the web with respect to computing. First we interacted with a server (1.0), now with cloud computing we interact with a number of servers which may self manage and adjust. Web 3.0 will spread across to include all resources so that idle cycles are not wasted. Imagine simply a web cloud, your PC/laptop and cellphone. While on, they are always computing something, which may or may not be for you, and when you need something computed, you reach into this network of web computing, PC/laptops and cellphones to accomplish your task. This makes us more efficient with resources and seems more responsive. Web 4.0 is harder still to imagine but if we consider that computers are vastly more intelligent and have great skill at predicting our behavior, then we can realize how all this network of interconnected devices can pre-compute, predicting what we will need. Extreme example would be, waking up on Saturday and the cellphone has loaded all the routes/maps in it's memory of where it expects you will go, perhaps you didn't even know it yourself, but your phone did.
Must get back to creating my 3D web3.0 "WorldLearningTree" education website. Twitter me (harleyw)

However it would be nice to eradicate the 2.0ing of everything. Got an old product - can't be bothered to improve its functionality? Slap 2.0 on the end and make it seem like something new. Oh and if you want to be ultra-innovative slap 3.0 on the end. No questions asked.

When the next 'trend' category comes along I expect web 2.0 to fade; what's been created won't, but it just won't use the tag.

In the software world, a version is a release at a current state of time, frozen in history forever, like a painting. The metaphor of Web 2.0 doesn't match the meaning. To accurately depict the culture of the internet over time, I think something like BB (Before Blogging) and AT (After Twitter), makes much more sense.

We can always look back to see what the major shifts in the tides were. We can make reasonable guesses about the future.

The semantic web is more important to machine learning then it will be to human aspirations, so I doubt that it will leverage such a radical transformation that self-publishing did. However, sufficient machine learning will allow us, eventually, to parse the explosive fractal media tree of one bi

Or at least the concepts that epitomized Web 2.0 will never die. They will simply become a standard feature set in the next phase of the web's evolution.

What the term will be is hard to say... however, I'm fairly certain it won't be labeled "Web 3.0" or any variation of the "Web X.0" theme. The phrase "Web 2.0" will simply go down as a term to categorize this decade, similar to how music is labeled; 70's Rock, 80's Pop or 90's Grunge.

The Flying '57 Chevy

An interesting part of future prediction, is we always seem to dream in context of the present. Take for instance the futurist illustrations of the 1940's and 50's. All the cars "looked" like the contemporary design, except they were able to fly, go underwater, or drive themselves.

The reality on the other hand is similar, but not exactly the same. Dick Treacy had a watch phone... but, they never predicted the cell phone. Same concept, different interpretation.

Intelligence is Key

So, what will the future bring?
We can see some beginnings of the trends for the next decade... mainly in the areas of "Intelligent", "Semantic", or "Contextual" web applications and concepts.

That's not to say we're looking at AI applications that will talk to us...

But, applications that can either predict or automate things based on a specific context. Things like Geolocation and interoperability between services, but also external inputs like motion, temprature, or even sounds.

We've already seen it's beginings in things like OpenID, the iPhone, or Google's Lattitude.

The trick is not to think of a flying Prius.

The web services that are still alive are consolidating, looking for ways to become profitable. I think this is a good thing. Web 2.0 is only the name of the buzz, what we said to frame what we were doing.

Web 2.0 should pass to make way for whatever comes next. Take email. It's a feature of the internet, not the web. How we use email and interface with it is a feature of the web, with web-mail. Emailing pictures to Posterous from my mobile and having them turn up on Facebook and Friendfeed takes it all to (what we call)web 2.0.

So, the question is, what features of web 2.0 will be a part of whatever comes next. What present day technology will take us to the next level.

I hope Microblogs will be there, and Friendfeed and Flickr and netbooks but I couldn't tell you how I'll be using them. I'm hoping for the semantic web although my understanding of this is vague. I think of it as "as-good-as-human filtering", which is what Twitter did and Friendeed does, complete with comments :)

Since then I found no new and useful web applications. There are minor, improved competitors of the existing web based services (for example: although there are many older web storages, Dropbox is arguably a major improvement over them), but nothing new.

The frustrating momentum of this is that
-at first, there are quite many services that brought no improvements over the others, but money was proud onto them earlier
-at second, there are so much to improve that nobody deals with. For example, forums contain huge amount of information but it is nearly impossible to search them because of the huge amount of hidden info contained in the threads of the post, the lack of tagging of the posts, etc.

Great question. However, the answer could be varied depending on how people think what Web 2.0 is. I can see that the many commentators here have different opinions. The difference is indeed, however, all about another question that we thought we have resolved but never truly succeeded, i.e., what Web 2.0 really is. When people have different ideas on what Web 2.0 is, certainly they have varied answers to the question.

Now I would like to share my answer on the basis that Web 2.0 is a stage of Web evolution. That is, Web 2.0 represents a particular Web-evolutionary stage that can be identified by the blooming of social networking and RSS. If this is the condition, then I would say that Web 2.0 is passing (instead of using the term dying). This particular stage of Web 2.0 is passing. That is, as the other commentators have mentioned, the representative Web-2.0 concepts such as social networking and information syndication from multiple sites are no longer innovative. They have become common thoughts to nearly everybody. The age of Web 2.0 has already passed its peak and now it is the time of decaying.

What is going to happen after Web 2.0 then? There is no name for the next stage yet, though we may call it "Web 3.0" (many people, however, hate the name). But the name is not important. The critical point is that it is going to be another stage after Web 2.0 that is significantly different from Web 2.0, as if Web 2.0 has been different from the stage before Web 2.0 (Web 1.0?).

Is the next stage Semantic Web? Hesitatingly I would say so because to my opinion, Semantic Web is a status that represents that the Web becomes fairly automatic machine-understandable in contrast to a stage as Web 2.0 represents. Certainly the Web is moving towards Semantic Web. But it is different to say that Semantic Web is the next stage of the Web.

I would rather say that the next stage of the Web is something that is going to illustrate an innovative concept (similar to the concept "social networking") that prompts the virtual world of WWW. It will be a concept that is concrete and implementable and may immediately leads to a new form of Web business as the concept "social networking" has impacted our world. It is not something like "machine-understandable", which is vague, abstract, and indirect to immediate implementation. What is the concept? I have a few thoughts but they are immature and I am hesitate to share at this moment. But at least this is what I see towards the future of the Web.

The age of Web 2.0 is passing, while the concept of Web 2.0 will be ever-lasting.

Yihong

I agree web 3.0 (if we end up using that, which I hope we don't because the third movie in a trilogy usually sucks) will be about the mobile web.

Anyone else think this article should've been a tweet?

Whatever.

While the human urge to categorize and group information is strong, there are no versions of the Web. There are however continuous improvements, each one building on the last. And I think we can see one overarching trend that has shaped, and will continue to shape, the Web and we who use it: *Democratization*.

You see this trend in how people communicate - blogs and later microblogs have given everyone a platform to publish and interact. The barrier to entry continues to be lowered, and your ability to reach a large audience, as well as the specific group of people that you care a lot about, continues to increase.

What needs to happen, and therefore will, are two things (at least):

1. Bringing the Web to more people, more places and more contexts. The mobile Web will play a huge part in this, giving affordable Internet access to many, and giving _more_ Internet access to those who already have it.

2. Using the power of the crowd. Companies and services have already begun to tap into our collective wisdom. As it stands, most of these initiatives are crude, unintuitive and frankly, not that relevant to most people. The signs are here however - the fact that some have left RSS-readers behind in favor of Twitter is just one. With time, social recommendations will be perfected and become the norm. The Semantic Web will power social classification and create social navigation.

So, Web 3.0? Whatever. But the future of the Web is spelled "people".

The shell isn't important.

bye
Andraz Tori

The Internet continues to grow and transform itself and the areas it impacts -- basically every person and industry that touches it. People have a need to categorize things, so let's just say the Web x.0 continues to move forward. Proliferation, mainstream adoption and complete integration into daily life. Whatever we call it, there's been nothing in history this disruptive to hit a global audience since the creation/accessibility of the PC.

Social networking. Software-as-a-Service. Mobile Internet. Cloud Computing. Enterprise x.0. Welcome to technology's evolution and revolution.

It's a framework, that's it.

Many of you want to label it as a 'system' or 'marketing concept' but it's neither.

It's simply a departure from one way to the next in design, continuity, usability and features.

SocialWeb has taken many ideas of 2.0 and has built upon it making sites much easier to navigate, content more consumable, and interaction more possible... not to mention the nifty visual appeal that many 2.0 ideas provide.

Until a different framework is cast, the "2.0" style will remain prevalent, as it should, because it provides the most benefit to site's users, still.

Now, I believe, we’re beginning to see what has happened to the browsers and search engines: a winnowing of tools. Some good, some bad, some unstable. Some finally are beginning to have reputations (or a history). There’s also a consolidation of some tools. Google and Yahoo are purchasing to fill in their holes.

Finally, the Web applications have become commonplace. As Oprah and President Obama are testaments, Twitter and Skype are now part of the everyday fabric of mainstream media and America. So, the unknowns about Web 2.0 are less unknown. Many more people are using the applications. As your own article describes, companies are leveraging these technologies for business and enterprise wide applications.

However, we still have a number of issues that have not shaken out. For example, many of the tools are teetering on an unsound or unspoken business model. Their sustainability is questionable. The stability of the tools is still questionable in many regards. Just because Oprah is tweeting doesn’t mean that Twitter is any more reliable.

Web 2.0 (or what how anyone wishes to paraphrase it), is now growing to maturity, the next step is moving it to the TV screen, which I believe is still the number one medium for the masses. Coming from the UK we are seeing a push by the BBC to deliver its catch up content onto the big home screen.
When this hit’s mass market, we will see another jump in the use of Flicker and other picture sharing sites. Social networking will take on a new dimension, as we grow and interact with the programs we are watching.

Voice and Video calling will grow as we communicate two ways via our TV sets.
Once the bad times move on in the economy the mobile web will come and change it all again taking the web real-time. As it moves from the PC to a myriad of device (TV, Tablets, ebooks, digital paper, phones etc) and consumed mass market then it will be enhanced and evolve.

Dial-up internet died when broadband came along, enabling the web2.0 phrase, 3G/HSPA services are now delivering the mobility we crave. This is spawning the location, contextual services this will drive early semantic usage, but only when the masses are comfortable and we have truly broken free of the PC will the next wave take hold.

It is us spotter (the likes of you, me and the readers of blogs like this) that are bored and crave the next step on this adventure, we still love to see new cool apps, like the picture editing highlighted earlier in the week.

Web2.0 (or any incantation) has not died it has now moved and is being consumed and understood by more and more people. For us it is dead as we are the dreamers and doers of the adventure, we are eager to drive and deliver the next step on the webs journey. That is why we love the freedom and creativity the internet/web brings us.

"Web 3.0", on the other hand, remains elusive. It might be mobile computing. It might be cloud computing. It might be the Semantic Web. What people are missing is the idea: what's the big change in how people will do things online? Once we know that, then Web 3.0 will become the revolutionizing force that Web 2.0 was.

What's more, To write this comment, I signed into Facebook to identify myself to readwriteweb, and then I gave my friendfeed remote key so that rww can post my comment back to friendfeed. Friendfeed will then turn around and tweet my comment to twitter, which in turn will get picked up by a facebook app and posted back to Facebook as a status message, not to mention cross posted to my blog.

All of this is relatively new, this idea that sites are now working together whether they like it or not, isn't what the idea of web 2.0 was about. Web 2.0 was about sites that were no longer giving information to you but taking information from you, and it was a great evolution of the web, but now we are past that, now that I've given information to you, you are doing new things with that information by sharing it with others.

Web 2.0 is still here, but it's aging. The original Web 1.0 is sitting on the porch, aged and proud of his son Web 2.0, who is now looking down at his baby girl and trying to come up with the best name for her.

But, the Web 2.0 leaders from 2004, 2005, etc. are just taking off ... launch in '05/'06 ... material revenue in '07 ... growth in '08 ... real companies in '09.

Time to track the Web 2.0 success stories and see how they are doing. Exciting companies like Zoho, Freshbooks, Box.net, etc. etc. (and us EchoSign esignature) are really just taking off now. It takes time.

No, la web 2.0 no está muerta, sigue buena y funcionando. Muchos de mis aparatos en mi casa funcionan con web 2.0. Aunque yo creo que un web 3.0 seria sin embargo genial. Puedes imaginarte todas las cosas del web 2.0 sumadas a otra cosas mejores para un mejor funcionamiento de internet?

The future of Web 2.0 belongs to those who can bring meaning to it. What makes sites succeed? What makes them plateau. What makes them fail? It's the meaning they provide to their users.

Myspace left the gate as the first platform to connect with people in a "flat world." You could connect with everyone, but who wants to be friends with everyone, virtual or real? Being a voyer to everyone, even to the girl from high school I never talked to then, didn't have any value to me. When I joined Facebook, it was open only to college students and provided a new way to connect with classmates but now that my parents can comment on my Saturday night drinking choices (My dad saying: I didn't raised your daughter to drink Miller Lite) it is slowly loosing it's value. And when I joined Twitter a couple years ago, it was another place to update your status and became a hyper-voyer tool to find out where I was eating dinner. It has since evolved into a forum for anyone to gather as many followers as they can without actually providing any real opportunity for two way conversation, claim they're an expert but providing no original content or sign up because Oprah told them to. Seriously where's the conversation, how many @replies does Oprah have time for?

All of these major platforms have lost their meaning for me because once again, I am just a number in the masses. The AdAge article about Aston hitting 1Mil followers was perfect, a few people preaching to the many.

Web 2.0's original success was based on the theory of a 2-way conversation. People are preached to everyday in ways they have no voice. The government, the media, the education system, the marketing world, etc but social media is suppose to be just that. Social. Mom-centric communities are successful because Moms visit them. I don't have children so they aren't relevant to me. But to those moms who login 3 or 4 times a day, it's meaningful.

Web 2.0 has only just begun but will evolve from large dinosaur-ish platforms for everyone into communities that are relevant to some. The ones who will succeed in the future are those that embrace the niches and realized that it was never about quantity but always been about quality. Think frequency and not penetration.

Another major issue that is causing a “lack of buzz” is Web 2.0 itself. Many people think of Web 2.0 is just social networking and connectivity but there is a whole other side of it; user generated content. The amount of information and content on the web has exploded. But with this massive expansion of content and information the amount of noise on the web has grown just as fast. Even though there are sites/content/information coming out that serve people needs better than what they are currently using they will have no idea they exist just because there is so much clutter to search through. Hence causing desensitization or simply people can only see the big social giants because there is too much fog to find what they really want in “web 2.0” causing people to become slightly disinterested.

The only problem with killer applications like Twitter is that they can be used for both good and evil. Celebrities like Demi Moore are actually receiving Tweets from suicidal fans making cries for help and changing their lives for the better.

Polarizing, egotistical people like Sean "Diddy" Combs, on the other hand, use their Twitter following to perpetuate racist stereotypes while flippantly talking about how he is doing it to make money and loving it.

For example, during last week's live Larry King Live telecast on CNN at 8:00 P.M. Central Standard Time, I actually Tweeted Larry King via @KingsThings, Diddy via @iamdiddy, and Oprah @Oprah, looking for a response to several serious allegations of fraud, slander, and libel, amongst other things.

Not a single Tweet was reciprocated. Ironically enough, Larry King called Twitter "the great equalizer [between the people and the establishment]; where celebrity doesn't matter."

I used to think this was the truth. Now I'm really beginning to wonder...

Mobile Web
Cloud Computing
Virtual Worlds and Virtual Interaction
Real Personal Profile - With your real date of birth etc.
Data Portability between social networks
Blurred Boundaries between online, offline and mobile
Location based services
Creative Commons Media that is uploading from anywhere
Data Programs that manage you and your friend's data better

Most insufferably meaningless term.

With new search engines on the horizon (Wolfram's in particular), the web optimised for mobile OS access (powered by the iphone), websites as true applications (guardian news api), the whole net as social applications and inovation in semantic search (yahoo search monkey) the crazy train of web2.0 is soon to hit destination 3.0 - look out for it on Google latitude ;)

If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up? (Chuck Palahniuk)

See you at destination 3.0

Web 3.0 will be about the convergence of technologies and platforms such as Virtual Worlds, Augmented Reality and Spatial (Location-Aware) Technologies (VAST Media).

Indeed, the internet, social networking, and our entire digitial world will be like "air"... all around us, available at anytime.

While people still use the technologies, the technology is still valid. After all, there is more than one website out there using depreciated HTML tags, the same that there are sites out there utilising the best of Silverlight and other emerging languages (and lets face it, while we still don't have web browsers following the same conventions, no matter what the OS they're running on is, we're never going to all start moving in the same direction).

This topic keeps coming around looking at specific elements. Its was only a few years ago we were asking if ASP.NET had killed classic ASP (sadly no), if Cold Fusion was going to be replaced by .NET languages (thankfully so) and if HTML was going to be fully depreciated in favour of a pure XML solution (looks likely, but not for a few years yet).

So, no, it's not dead, because in reality, it's a design trend that has stood the test of time for a while.

Get a group of 50 web developers from various places around the world and ask them what Web 2.0 is, to define what they think it is (privately, so there is no peer influence) and then go through the results. You'll probably find each web developer or designer has a different meaning as to what Web 2.0 actually is.

Susan Boyle gets over 100 million views on Youtube and nobody makes a cent off of it.

If years into it things like this still happen now at one of the greatest web 2.0 hits... well there's not much hope for anyone is there?

If Web 2.0 is slowing down, another reason may be that the social web has hit a tipping point: Twitter, Facebook, iPhone and Blackberry have moved past the "household name" stage and into the everyday lives of millions of users. The massive influx of users was an expected outcome for Web 2.0, but it also opens the door to a new set of opportunities and challenges.

If you build it they will come; and they have. The question is, once everyone has poked a few friends on Facebook, and twittered from the grocery store, then what? Some of the rush has been toward the novelty of Web 2.0. But once the newness wears off, people and companies will commence using the web in ways that genuinely improve their lives and their bottom line. If Web 3.0 will have a vibe, it'll be this: "show me the value."

As far as the information part goes, businesses and the consumers that buy their products can benefit from leveraging Web 2.0 while integrating it into other efforts to reach customers to communicate more clearly and effectively- saving consumers time. While social connections remain very popular as people need to belong.

Where to next? While newer media like those built on the mobile platform will continue to be developed, at some point platforms optimized for specific categories of users would make a lot of sense. They would let you interact in a way that makes the sense to your life style or business instead of adapting to what is available in the same form to everyone.